As smart lists are designed today, a selected category as criteria in a smart list doesn't include product in it's sub-categories. That limitation has at least two negative consequences:
The need of extra admin when you create a smart list, since you have to mark plenty of sub-categories instead of only one single click
The need of keeping that smart-list up-to-date when new sub-categories are created since they don't get automatically included in the search criteria
In May release (8.32) we improved the selection of subcategories to be recursive, meaning that when setting up a product filter and selecting a category its subcategories are selected automatically. The sub categories can then be deselected individually. This reflects (1) in the idea.
We did not implement the second part of the idea (2) - the ability to somehow get new subcategories automatically included in the filter category selection.
See related idea: https://ideas.litium.com/ideas/PL-I-199
What's the status on this idea? Is this a feature we can look forward to having in Litium anytime soon?